Editorial: The white elephant on South St.

It hasn't been all that long ago that Home Hospital was a hub of action - a place where the majority of Greater Lafayette's babies entered the world and where people went for treatment for both the routine and the dire.

But since St. Elizabeth East opened and then patient services dwindled down to nothing by 2010, Home Hospital has been a white elephant.

Combined with the countdown to the new St. Elizabeth, which sits a few miles to the east, the vacant version of Home Hospital has seemed to be around longer than it actually has.

The recent admission from Terry Wilson, president and chief executive of Franciscan St. Elizabeth Health, that the former hospital might need to come down before the site can be sold didn't exactly come as a surprise. "The message from the market is that the building is not as marketable as the property," Wilson said.

As Franciscan St. Elizabeth Health knew going in, there are few good prospects for such a huge facility built with a specific use in mind. Even then, that specific use wasn't efficient enough, the way it was configured, for Franciscan St. Elizabeth Health to hang on to it. That is, after all, one of the big reasons to build fresh along Creasy Lane.

The 22 acres, cleared of the mothballed hospital, might be a different story. That's still a big "might."

There are plenty of eyes on Franciscan St. Elizabeth Health and the city of Lafayette, which has been helping sort through redevelopment ideas, as they come to a decision about what to do with that spot.

For now, it's looking less and less likely that the Home Hospital structure will survive redevelopment plans.

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Editorial: The white elephant on South St.

Our take: Options are running out at the vacant Home Hospital, where demolition might be the best first step toward redevelopment.